Snowden Has One Very Important And Potentially Devastating Question To Answer

It is still unclear how many files Snowden stole — and when he gave up access to them.screenshot
One of the fundamental disagreements between supporters and detractors of Edward Snowden comes down to a simple question:

Did Snowden take U.S. military documents not pertaining to surveillance?

On March 6, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey told Congress:

"The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures."

Snowden has denied any deliberate effort to gain access to any military information, saying: "They rely on a baseless premise, which is that I was after military information."

The ACLU's Ben Wizner, Snowden's legal adviser and primary spokesman, told Business Insider in an email that "the whole allegation is nonsense."

The two sides clearly disagree on what is a yes-or-no question. In any case, the NSA-trained hacker had the opportunity to gather and steal military intel in addition to surveillance documents.

Snowden used an automated web-crawling software to "scrape" the NSA's systems, and the program was made especially powerful by his passwords as a systems administrator and passwords of his colleagues.

Intelligence officials believe Snowden accessed or "touched" about 1.7 million files while helping to manage NSA computer systems in Hawaii. It's unclear how many documents, pertaining to surveillance and otherwise, the 30-year-old ended up taking.

"There's an ongoing debate in the [intelligence community] right now about what kinds of information did he touch, what did he take — what do we know?" Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told NPR.

Previously, Flynn told lawmakers: "Everything that he touched, we assume that he took."

Wizner did not respond to follow-up inquiries about Snowden's allegedly touching military information.

The New York Times reported that Snowden "appears to have set the parameters for the searches, including which subjects to look for and how deeply to follow links to documents and other data on the N.S.A.'s internal networks."

The unanswered question is critical.

"I'm concerned about defense capabilities that he may have stolen from where he worked, and does that knowledge then get into the hands of our adversaries," Lt. Gen. Flynn, who served as the top military intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, told NPR.

If Snowden accessed and lifted military information, it could endanger American troops.

"All military combat operations depend on NSA contributions," Robert Caruso, a former assistant command security manager in the Navy and a consultant, told Business Insider. "[The Department of Defense] depends on NSA and the Defense Information Systems Agency to secure all its networks, and others networks too."

For example, Flynn claimed that U.S. officials "know that there's some evidence that [Snowden] may have gotten some information about" how the U.S. military defeats improvised explosive devices (IEDs). "And so we have to protect, you know, how we defeat these kind of devices. So we may need to change some of the way we operate."

Caruso elaborated on Flynn's example:

"If Snowden has information about how we combat the IED threat — even if he didn't mean to take it — then it's not a post-MRAP world or even are-MRAP world — it's a future-American-casualties-that-could've-been-avoided world," Caruso said. "It doesn't matter what kind of armored vehicle you have."

Mike Nudelman/Michael Kelley/Business Insider

It's still unclear when Snowden gave up access to his full cache.

It appears that Snowden gave Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras as many as 200,000 surveillance files, including about 20,000 from the Australian Signals Directorate, 58,000 documents from Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency, some files pertaining to Canada, and an unknown but substantial number of NSA files.

Beyond those documents, the NSA assumes that Snowden took as many as 1.5 million more documents — that is, the other part of the 1.7 million he reportedly "touched."

So how many NSA documents, if any, did Snowden take but not give to journalists? And what happened to them?

Snowden told James Risen of The New York Times that he gave all of the classified documents he had taken from the NSA's internal systems to the journalists he met in Hong Kong and kept no copies himself. However, there are clear issues with that claim.

On June 12, two days after he parted ways with Poitras and Greenwald, Snowden leaked specific details of NSA hacking targets in China and Hong Kong to the South China Morning Post. Snowden also told SCMP that he intended to leak more documents later.

"If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment," he said.

Greenwald subsequently told The Daily Beast that Snowden had more NSA files than he gave to Greenwald and Poitras: "I believe he does. He was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published."

Then, on July 14, three weeks after Snowden had flown to Moscow, Greenwald told the Associated Press that Snowden "is in possession of literally thousands of documents ... that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."

The U.S. believes Snowden's cache also includes 31,000 documents that do not deal with NSA surveillance "but primarily with standard intelligence about other countries' military capabilities, including weapons systems."

Rick Ledgett, who heads the task force investigating Snowden's raid on the NSA's systems in Hawaii, told "60 Minutes" that those files — some of the most closely held secrets by the United States — "would give [other countries] a road map of what we know, what we don't know, and give them, implicitly, a way to protect their information from the U.S. intelligence community's view."

Significantly, Snowden has not explicitly denied taking documents unrelated to surveillance on citizens (such as "keys to the kingdom"). When asked follow-up questions, Wizner pointed to the initial statement about Snowden not being "after" military intel.

The leak of military intelligence, if Snowden took any, could "hinder future military operations," Caruso told BI. "That is my fear, and in my view that position is not unfounded. We are talking the loss of our qualitative military edge, the possibility a future enemy on a future battlefield has advance knowledge of our tactics, techniques, and procedures."